Hebammenpraxis Rundum

08/12/2024

03/09/2024

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23/08/2024

“Sleeping like a baby” is a funny phrase. We use it to mean contented, peaceful sleep - but that’s often not how babies sleep at all. Yes, they have periods of real stillness during sleep, but they also have periods where they are very active - yet still completely asleep.

Babies spend a lot of time in active sleep, which is an immature form of REM sleep. When we watch an adult in REM sleep, their body is paralysed but we can see rapid eye movement darting under the eyelid. The adult body barely moves at all during this stage, other than an odd jerk. Babies however are very different. They move - a lot. They wriggle and thrash around. They have facial expressions, they suck, they might even cry, grunt or whimper (Barbeau & Weiss 2017, Dereymaeker 2017). This can make you think they need you or are in some kind of discomfort when in fact they are asleep and perhaps dreaming.

Researchers found that touching babies during this active sleep made them almost twice as likely to wake than touching them during quiet sleep (McNamara et al 2002).

If your baby is moving around, and making noises they might just be in this active sleep stage. It’s ok to wait for a few minutes and see if they are really signalling to you or if they are just in this noisy active sleep stage. If you wait you might find that in another few minutes they might just pass on to the next more quiet phase of sleep.

This is something I wish that someone had told me about with my eldest. I definitely frequently woke him to feed when he wasn’t actually signalling for me because I didn’t understand baby sleep. What about you?

20/03/2024

29/02/2024

Der 29. Februar - Die faszinierende Geschichte des Schaltjahrs